Teaching Cars to See

Christoph Stiller from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, will talk on "Seminar Details
Scene Perception for Cognitive Automobiles", at the ANU in Canberra, 25 March 2010:

Seminar Details

Scene Perception for Cognitive Automobiles

Christoph Stiller (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology)

CSIRO ICT

DATE: 2010-03-25
TIME: 10:00:00 - 11:00:00
LOCATION: RSISE Seminar Room, ground floor, building 115, cnr. North and Daley Roads, ANU
CONTACT: Renate.Hays@csiro.au

ABSTRACT:
Environment perception and scene understanding are crucial issues for autonomous or assisted navigation of mobiles. Just like human drivers plan, initiate, supervise, and control suitable behavior based on the perception and understanding of the scene, cognitive systems project those capabilities onto artificial systems. This contribution focuses on methods that provide perceptual capabilities to automobiles. It is embedded in the Karlsruhe-Munich Collaborative Transregional Research Centre A'Cognitive AutomobilesA addressing systematic and interdisciplinary research on machine cognition of mobile systems as the basis for a scientific theory of automated machine behavior. The potential of cooperative perception and behavior is examined. Experimental autonomous vehicles and closed-loop simulations accompany analytic research. Cognitive Automobiles require methods for acquisition of metric, symbolic, and conceptual knowledge. These exploit diversity in the analysis of data from complementary sensors including auto calibrating active vision as well as lidar sensors. Markov Logic Networks are introduced to infer relationships among objects. First results are presented including the teamAs finalistAs entry to the Darpa Urban Challenge.

BIO:
Christoph Stiller received the Diploma degree in Electrical Engineering from Aachen University of Technology, Germany in 1988. In 1987/1988 he visited the Norwegian University of Technology in Trondheim, Norway for six months. In 1988 he became a Scientific Assistant at Aachen University of Technology. After completion of his Dr.-Ing. degree (Ph.D.) with distinction, he worked at INRS-Telecommunications in Montreal, Canada as a post-doctoral Member of the Scientific Staff in 1994/1995. In 1995 he joined the Corporate Research and Advanced Development of Robert Bosch GmbH, Hildesheim, Germany, where he was responsible for 'Computer Vision for Automotive Applications'. In 2001 he became chaired professor and director of the Institute for Metrology and Control Engineering at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany.

His present interest covers sensor signal analysis, visual inspection, video sensing, information fusion and real-time applications thereof. He is author or co-author of more than 100 publications and patents in this field. He is speaker of the Transregional Collaborative Research Center 'Cognitive Automobiles'. Dr. Stiller is Vice President Publications of the IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems Society since 2010. He serves as Editor in Chief of the IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems Magazine (2009-ongoing) and as Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Image Processing (1999-2003) and IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems (2004-ongoing). He has served as program chair for the IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium 2004 and is appointed general chair of the IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium 2010 in Germany. He is member of the German Electrical Engineering Association (VDE).